News

jQuery 3.0 alpha has been announced with plenty of breaking changes. The team wants to get feedback from the community over some of the proposed changes and developers need to test the updated library against their existing code.

Mozilla has released Firefox 39, after initial stability issues caused by a third party application.
The much-anticipated release brings with it support for CSS Scroll Snap Points, new sharing features, and improved dev tools -- as well as several critical bug fixes.

Google Material Design Lite) (MDL) aims to enable material design look and feel for websites. Material design is a visual language that is standard on Android and that Google is proposing cross-platform.

Recently, Flipboard has released the web version of its social-network aggregation magazine-format reader. This release aims to bring to the browser the same reading experience users have on Flipboard native applications. To accomplish it, the team responsible for the development had to push boundaries in web technologies to match its native apps counterparts.

Microsoft has provided new information on the reasoning behind the switch to a brand new rendering engine for Project Spartan, the web browser shipping with Windows 10. The new engine is a fork of Trident and eliminates swathes of code that have been in place for 20 years.

After many years of working on HTML5 support, YouTube has decided to use their HTML5 video player as the default for modern browsers, using the old Flash-based player only for legacy browsers. Using MPEG-DASH and W3C Media Source Extensions, YouTube can use Adaptive Bitrate streaming to reduce buffering and improve initial playback speed.

The SFHTML5 group recently had a meeting discussing HTML5 technologies for creating virtual reality experiences – WebGL, WebVR, Three.js, GLAM –, and the current development status for implementing support for them in Firefox and Chrome. The idea is to bring the entire web into the VR experience.

AppGyver has announced Supersonic, a new framework to build hybrid mobile apps on Android and iOS that promises to provide "real native performance," says AppGyver, thanks to a novel approach to designing hybrid apps. Supersonic is also integrated with Steroids, an impressive cross-platform IDE for hybrid apps.

ZURB, a web design company and creator of Foundation (for Sites), has announced and open sourced another framework called Foundation for Apps (FA). FA provides HTML5/JavaScript tools for creating responsive web applications for desktop and mobile devices.

The service worker browser feature holds promise for developers looking to make their web apps feel more like native apps. Running in the background and without user interaction, service workers enable advanced scenarios such as offline functionality, cache, background sync, geofencing, and push notifications.